At the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Netflix took the stage to talk about the variety of original programming it is currently working on. If the shows prove successful, this could be a new direction for the streaming service that has devoted a lot of time and resources to acquiring licensing deals.
“The freedom to make interesting shows — without a network controlling the process or the output — seemed to be an underlying theme, though I don’t think anyone actually came out and said it,” comments GigaOM writer Ryan Lawler. “In that respect, Netflix could use its newcomer status as a way to recruit more talented content creators who are frustrated by the usual network system.”
Jenji Kohan, the creator of “Weeds” and the head of Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” series, said working for Netflix on original content is a great new business model and provides opportunities that might not be available at a traditional TV network.
Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos acknowledged that delving into content creation does put the company in competition with the same people they try so hard to get licensing deals from.
“But if Netflix ends up competing for a greater share of viewers’ attention with its streaming offering, it’s only fair, Sarandos posited. After all, the increasing number of TV Everywhere apps and services are starting to encroach on its turf,” reports GigaOM.
Google is expected to release its Dropbox competitor, Google Drive, by next week.
Draft specs for the new cloud storage service have leaked. Google Drive will reportedly include 5GB free storage, will work in desktop folders on Mac and Windows systems, and will be available via http://drive.google.com.
TheNextWeb predicts that the service will also feature in-app document editing.
“Now as for the reliability of the information? It’s not at all uncommon for big companies to launch with partners for new features,” explains the post. “When that happens, the partners will often-times have a heads up to integration and specifics, and that’s exactly what appears to have happened here as it did with the Lucidchart leak from last week.” (The earlier report showed a leaked page for linking Google Drive to online diagramming tool Lucidchart for automatically syncing documents in the cloud.)
Nicira, “the most intriguing startup in Silicon Valley” according to Wired, has created a network virtualization technology that enables companies to program their networks as they do with server virtualization.
The technology runs on top of any network hardware which is used only to move network packets. The network virtualization software provides all the intelligence allowing one to reconfigure the network infrastructure. Thus, rather than be locked into a specific network configuration, the entire network architecture can be altered in software rather than hardware to fit the current requirements.
Nicira’s Open vSwitch goes beyond OpenFlow, which requires vendors to incorporate the protocol in their hardware. It can work with any network gear, even inexpensive hardware.
Companies like Google, AT&T, eBay, NTT, Fidelity and Rackspace are already using Nicira to manage their networks.
“We have hundreds of thousands of customers, and that translates into multiple hundreds of thousands of network or network segments that customers want to create,” says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, which is currently using the Nicira platform for a beta version of its cloud service. “Nicira gives us the ability to put any customer, any end point, any location on one common virtual network.”
Google is already buying inexpensive network hardware from Taiwan and China, thus bypassing more expensive options from Cisco and Juniper. Martin Casado, Nicira’s CTO, thinks over time that network hardware will become less important compared to the network software.
Facebook is making it easier for fans to listen to music through Musician Pages with a new “Listen” button right beside the “Like” button.
The button launches the user’s most frequently used Facebook music streaming app — or if there isn’t one, prompts users to set up a service like Spotify, Rdio or MOG.
When a user hovers over the “Listen” button, it will indicate which service it requires to play the songs or album.
This new function won’t bring in a lot of revenue for artists who get very small streaming royalties, but it could help capture fans, getting them to “fall in love with their recorded music,” suggests TechCrunch.
“Overall, this is a smart build-out of Facebook’s music partnerships from f8, and the synchronous “Listen With” feature it added in January,” adds the post. “This could make Facebook Pages your first stop when you want to check out a new band.”
For now, the button is only available on the Web, but TechCrunch is hopeful a mobile version will eventually follow. “Down the line, Facebook could even add a similar ‘Watch’ button to TV show and movies Pages that would launch Hulu or Netflix,” the post states.
A survey of U.S. consumers by RBC Capital Markets showed a marked preference for choosing an a la carte selection of channels rather than a bundled package as offered by the MSOs.
If consumers could choose, they would subscribe to an average of just 19 channels which would cost $1.50 each or $28.50 per month. As a comparison, they now pay $84 for at least 91 channels.
“But the investment research firm’s math confirms long-held views by both content companies and MSOs that a la carte economics would dramatically hurt a business that is a major revenue driver to both industries,” reports Variety. “A likely scenario sketched out by RBC’s report envisioned the $34 billion content companies received in affiliate fees last year getting cut roughly in half if consumers could cherrypick channels.”
The a la carte approach has been debated for many years. The FCC studied the prospect of making the model mandatory in 2004, and more recently cable operators have considered the idea.
Instead, MSOs have been experimenting with lower-priced tiers, but with surprisingly limited market traction. “We are not quite sure why the consumer who supposedly wants an a la carte solution has not simply ‘traded down,'” the RBC report notes.
Skitter has announced an affordable alternative for cord-cutters with its video streaming service that provides local stations via the Internet.
“Launched recently in Portland during March 2012, an Atlanta-based video platform company named Skitter has started streaming ten broadcast channels that includes CBS, the CW, TBN and two PBS affiliates at a price of $6 a month for the basic package,” reports Digital Trends.
“Accessible through the Roku platform as well as the Western Digital Live set-top box and the Western Digital TV Live Hub, Portland consumers can view upcoming programming through a channel-grid guide and watch live television without the need for an external antenna.”
Skitter has plans to launch in five additional markets in the upcoming months that will reportedly include NBC, FOX and ABC. The cost is expected to run $12-15 per month. The company hopes to go nationwide in the future.
“A similar service called Aereo launched in New York City earlier this year for a cost of $12 per month, but has come under legal pressure from local broadcasters due to claims of copyright infringement. While the concept of the service is the same, Skitter is avoiding the legal kerfuffle by obtaining retransmission licenses from broadcasters in order to bring the service direct to consumers. Skitter was already acquiring these licenses to sell their technology to telco operators in areas around the country,” explains the article.
The new digital media box from Sony called Nasne will connect to Sony’s various products with satellite and terrestrial TV tuners.
The unit can be used as a playback or standard media storage device and is expandable via external hard drives.
“Nasne has a 500GB hard drive of its own, however, and will extend deeper into the Sony ecosystem by letting Sony Tablet and Xperia phone users access recorded content when on the same home network. There will also be an app for the PS Vita, which currently offers limited streaming ability with Torne, and VAIO users will be able to watch and record TV broadcasts from their computers,” reports The Verge.
The Nasne’s predecessor, the Torne was also a PlayStation 3 TV tuner accessory that recorded TV broadcasts. If the Torne is any indication, the Nasne could very well never be sold outside Japan, suggests the post.
James Cameron is calling for Hollywood to “wake up and smell the coffee” when it comes to 3D. At the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Cameron said that films should be shot in 3D rather than produced in 2D and later converted to 3D.
Cameron recently released “Titanic” in 3D, a work that took 14 months and cost $18 million. “If you are willing do that, fine. But who is willing to make a $150 million movie and then sit on the interest costs for a year while you post produce it in 3D? It is going to be a helluva lot more expensive (than shooting native 3D),” he said.
Cameron is at NAB alongside business partner Vince Pace representing Cameron Pace Group (CPG) to promote a business model for making 3D more profitable.
“With an eye toward live sports, CPG has been offering a Shadowcam ‘5D’ system, meaning that a 2D and 3D production is piggybacked on a single rig,” explains Carolyn Giardina writing for The Hollywood Reporter. “It has already been used on productions including last year’s US Open Tennis Championship and recent The Masters golf tournament. At NAB, the team is extending the camera system, with the introductions of new tools including a Shadowcam handheld camera rig and a Shadowcaster ‘5D’ mobile unit.”
“If I were producing an episodic series, I would produce it like Avatar with one 3D camera system (and extract the single eye for the 2D),” Cameron added in regards to TV production. “I would encourage people to go right to a native 3D and extract the 2D. I think episodic will gravitate toward the feature model.”
The NAB has announced it will set aside $3 million a year for a new lab designed to help broadcasters keep pace with digital media.
Kevin Gage, formerly of Warner Bros. and NBCUniversal, has been hired as the organization’s first chief technology officer. Gage will be responsible for running the new lab, among other duties.
According to TVNewsCheck: “…for now the lab will not be a place you can visit. It will be more of an investment fund, he says, seeking out the best ideas for improving the broadcast media and nurturing them with infusions of cash.”
“[W]e’re now in a situation where we can start innovating and using new technologies that are out there to be able to connect with the consumer in ways that we have never connected before. That’s really what the lab is there to do,” says Gage.
In an interview with TVNewsCheck, Gage discussed some of the projects he plans for the new lab: “In radio, we’re working on an AM engineering study that we kicked off in the last fiscal year, as well as HD radio in FM. And then on the TV side, we’re fostering innovation with mobile DTV, and we are moving forward to potentially a new broadcast standard. What would be the ramifications and the benefits of being able to go to something different in the future?”
Cloud computing has a strong presence at this year’s NAB Show, with big companies such as Amazon and Microsoft touting its possibilities.
The cloud is being promoted to meet the capacity needs created by the ever-increasing demand for higher image resolutions. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Windows Azure Media Services are two solutions designed for broadcasters.
“With media production being a prime candidate for cloud services given its project-specific nature (think rent versus buy) and typically collaborative-approach, it comes as no surprise that the cloud industry is descending on Vegas and the broadcaster association put together a cloud-specific channel for the show this year,” reports Wired Cloudline.
“We’ve reached an inflection point in the industry where the studios — which have made do with just enough compute capacity that they could keep up but now that more of their work is going digital, scaling that infrastructure is difficult and expensive,” said Grant Kirkwood, CEO of Unitas Global, which is demonstrating its cloud-based rendering solution at NAB.
“With the increase of resolution from 2K to 4K being the standard, the amount of data to be rendered is through the roof. If I’m a visual effects studio, I’m going to have to render a film at 24, 25 and 30 frames per second [for TV, Blu-ray and movie formats.] At the resulting 79 frames per second, using 4K resolution, each frame is 24 gigabytes of data. Imagine what that means for a two-hour movie,” Kirkwood said.
According to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the “open Internet” is more in danger of being controlled and restricted now than ever before.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin noted foreign governments trying to control online access and communication and the entertainment industry, with its support of proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation.
Brin also mentioned tech giants like Facebook and Apple, both of whom he suggests have “restrictive” policies that help to close the Internet rather than open it up.
Regarding governments, he added: “We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the Web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.”
With an Internet dominated by Facebook, Brin suggests a Google may not have been created: “You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the Web was so open.”
An increasing number of consumers watch their television while using an iPad to surf the Web at the same time, according to a new study.
Forrester Research suggests that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. use their devices while they watch TV, and 12 percent claim they watch less TV since they got their tablets.
Additionally, about 35 percent of tablet owners say they now use their laptops less, and 45 percent say they have no plans to purchase an e-reader.
“Smaller TVs in other rooms, like the bedroom and kitchen, are also being displaced by tablets,” reports MediaPost. “About a third of tablet users say they will not buy another small TV, while only 7 percent say the same about large-screen TVs.”
A number of companies are launching new services and apps designed to maintain viewer interest across the two screens.
The Forrester report rates Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in this space. “It identifies Apple as the early tablet-TV leader, courtesy of the iPad. With 55 million of the devices sold worldwide since December, no other tablet has attracted nearly as many developers,” explains the article.
Google continues to expand its movie rental service on YouTube and within Google Play, announcing a deal with MGM to make about 600 of the studio’s movies available.
This is in addition to Google’s deal with Paramount, announced just weeks ago, that brought about 500 movies to YouTube and Google Play.
“Google promises to add more MGM titles to its catalog ‘in the weeks ahead.’ It’s not clear if this deal just focuses on older movies, though, or if more recent MGM titles like ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ will also be included in the YouTube rental catalog,” reports TechCrunch.
Now Google has agreements with five major U.S. studios and more than 10 independent studios.
“Overall, this looks like a good addition to YouTube’s and Google Play’s catalog,” suggests the post. “Viewers, after all, rate streaming services based on the availability of the movies they want to see. As a newcomer in this market, Google still has some catching up to do, but it’s slowly becoming competitive.”
For owners of LG’s Cinema 3D Smart TVs, a new online video store is available — with all 3D content.
Called 3D World, the store offers users access to “a catalogue of entertainment, sports, documentary, kids and lifestyle programming that’ll swell as the company ties down more deals with providers,” reports Engadget.
“3D World is a critical part of LG’s long-term strategy which includes controlling more of the 3D ecosystem that Cinema 3D owners experience,” said Havis Kwon, president and CEO of LG Home Entertainment Company. “With the global roll-out of 3D World, LG is demonstrating its commitment to providing diverse, high quality 3D content.”
For those who have a 2011 model of the LG TV, it’s possible to download the 3D World app. For those with a 2012 model, the app will appear as part of a card system on the Home Dashboard.
Canon, Sony and RED may be getting all the attention regarding new camera announcements at this week’s ongoing NAB show in Las Vegas, but Blackmagic Design also has a new one to announce, and initial reports suggest it’s rather impressive.
“Priced at $2,995, where the company sees this as differing from the competition is its ability to capture film quality video on its 2.5K sensor and output it to CinemaDNG RAW, ProRes and DNxHD file formats,” reports Engadget. “That camera housing can take Canon or Zeiss lenses on the front, contains a built-in SSD within and has a capacitive touchscreen display for control and metadata entry.”
The camera also includes 13 stops of dynamic range, a built-in LCD, and color correction with DaVinci Resolve.
“Many current generation video cameras suffer from a ‘video look’ due to a limited contrast range, a maximum HD resolution sensor, poor quality optics and lenses, the use of heavy video compression for file recording and poor integration with NLE software metadata management,” suggests the company’s press release. “Blackmagic Cinema Camera has been designed to eliminate these problems so customers get a true feature film look, and at an affordable cost can shoot high end television commercials, episodic television programming and feature films.”